Glasgow wartime group roll back the years as they share memories of WW2

At the Holyrood garden party, six women – aged from 89 to 97 – who served in the Second World War laughed and chatted and shared memories with Her Majesty.

According to Mardie Miller, one of the group, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Picture by Jamie Simpson: Great-great grandmother Mardie Miller at home in King’s Park holding a picture from her Bletchley park days 

“The Queen was very friendly and both she and the Duke of Edinburgh spoke to us, all about the work we did,” explains Mardie, who is 93.

“We didn’t serve together in the war, but we have all become close friends through the Glasgow Wrens group, which celebrated its 70th anniversary recently.”

Mardie joined fellow Wrens Joyce Murray Campbell, Marjorie Lamb, Sheila Michael, Sheila Smith and Jean Watson at the event in Edinburgh.

(The oldest member of the Glasgow Wrens, Ailsa Stewart, a sprightly 101-year-old who gets the bus to the monthly meetings from her home in Campbeltown, couldn’t make it on the day.) The group also included 97-year-old Marjorie Lamb (nee Corbett), who spent two years in Egypt as an officer and Jean Watson, 91, from Largs, who was stationed in London, Liverpool, Ireland and Stornoway when she worked in the supply branch.

Picture: The Queen meets members of the Glasgow Wrens Association at the annual garden party at Holyroodhouse on July 4 in Edinburgh

She agrees: “It was a wonderful two years for me. Stornoway especially played a very important part in the war because they were training ships as escorts to the North Atlantic convoys and they used to come in to refuel.”

Mardie Miller, who lives in King’s Park, was a teenager working for Paramount Films when she signed up to the Wrens – the Women’s Royal Naval Service – in 1942.

Mardie was sent to Mill Hill in London for training.

“It was hard – we had to scrub floors, clean toilets, wash walls,” she says. “You were told what to do and you just did it.

“There were a few girls there, who had come straight from boarding school, and they were mummy’s little darlings. This new life was a bit of a shock to them, so they just left.

“But I stayed, and I enjoyed it.”

One day, recalls Mardie, the young women were called in to a meeting hall and told where they would be stationed.

“My name was read out and I was told to go to Bletchley Park,” she says.

“I had no idea where that was, or what I would be doing.

“We arrived at Bletchley station and were taken to Gayhurst Manor, a lovely old Elizabethan mansion, which had huts built in the grounds. I stayed in one of the huts and every day, made the trip to Bletchley, where we worked American-style shifts – 8am until 4pm, 4pm until midnight, midnight until 8am.”

Mardie adds: “At Bletchley we were told we would be working on the Bombes – the machines that broke the Enigma coded messages of the Germans – although we didn’t know that at the time.

“We just went into the huts and carried out the tasks asked of us.

“I went back to Bletchley recently, and they had one of the Bombes working again. I remember looking at it and thinking – I used to have to hold the disc in my hand and use a pair of tweezers to make sure the brushes inside were all straight. It came back to me in a rush.”

MARDIE didn’t find out what her work at Bletchley was all about until many years later.

“I had no idea why I’d been picked to go there – I wasn’t particularly clever and I didn’t do that well at school,” she smiles.

“But after the war, I was speaking to a Wren officer, who asked me if I’d finished my training at Mill Hill. When I said yes, she told me – that’s why you went to Bletchley. At Mill Hill, they watched continually, to see who could take orders, perform tasks quickly and efficiently, without asking questions.

“It was because of all the secrecy, I suppose, the need to be discreet.”

Some time after she arrived at Bletchley, Mardie was posted overseas.

“Because I was not yet 21, they had to write to my mother to ask permission,” she says. “Thankfully, she said yes. I was sent to Columbo in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, where we had to work on breaking the Japanese codes.

“It was a different machine from the ones in Bletchley, it was called a Hollerith.”

Was it strange, being so young, so far away from home?

Picture: Bletchley Park workers in the canteen at Bletchley, with a ticket for a bottle of beer

“It was wonderful,” beams Mardie. “It was one of the best times of my life. It took us six weeks to get there on the ship and at the end of the war, after VE Day, we had to stay on until VJ Day.

“We helped with the prisoners of war, giving them food and water – and beer! They were in a terrible state, which was very sad.

“We eventually arrived back in Britain on Armistice Day – I remember there was a thick fog, like nothing I’d seen before. We were treated like Royalty when we got off the ship.”

After the war, Mardie got a job at Weir’s in Cathcart, where the wages were done, coincidentally, on Hollerith machines.

“I didn’t last long, to be honest – I was used to working these machines all day every day, and fixing them if they broke down, or repairing broken parts,” she frowns. “All of a sudden, if there was a problem, I had to call the engineers and some man would have to come up and do it, when I could quite easily have done it myself.

“It was very frustrating.”

Mardie, whose husband Norrie sadly died 27 years ago, is now a great-great-grandmother and her family – two daughters, three grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and four great-great-granchildren – love to hear her stories of life in the wartime Wrens.

“It was a very happy time for me, with wonderful camaraderie,” she says, softly. “The group in Glasgow has that same sense of comradeship, a real sense of friendship amongst us. We make everyone welcome and take an interest in each other. We didn’t serve together, but now we share our memories together and that’s a wonderful thing.”